SATURDAY CHAT

Good news or bad, there's always a local angle

When I was a young reporter one of my mentors was Charlie Sampas, our news editor at the time. He was a true Lowellian. He loved the city. He loved its history.

He always told me to "watch for the Lowell angle in every story."

And over the years, I have marveled about how right he was.

I'm amazed how many times Lowell pops up, no matter where I am.

I've pointed out many times that even in my travels I run into a Lowell angle.

One of my favorite stories involved my first trip to Ireland more than 25 years ago. My wife and I walked into a pub in an isolated town in Ireland and the first person I saw was a man from Lowell sitting at the bar. I walked up and said hello to Harry Keon, who was living in Ireland at the time. He started to laugh and asked if I still lived on Harvard Street. When I replied yes, he said you just missed your next door neighbors -- Paul and Molly Sheehy.

I've told this story many times as the best evidence you can find a Lowell angle anywhere in the world.

This was brought back to me a couple of weeks ago when my wife and I were heading back to Lowell from Florida.

The morning we were leaving, I picked up a copy of my favorite Florida newspaper, The Tampa Bay Times. On the front page was the picture of a modest house in St. Petersburg. According to the story, the house was the last home in Florida of Lowell writer Jack Kerouac.

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The home is apparently being turned into a shrine in honor of the Beat generation writer.

The story said one of the few items linking the home to the On the Road writer, was a "1960s telephone book from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts."

That same day I picked up a book for the ride home. It was titled Defending Jacob.

I didn't know anything about it except it was about a murder trial.

The plot involved a murder in Middlesex County where an assistant district attorney's son was being charged. A few pages into the book I find out the lawyer's father was involved in a fatal confrontation in Lowell, Massachusetts years earlier when he stopped for hot dogs at the original Elliot's stand. There was also a reference to the famed Birke's Department store. More proof of the Charlie Sampas theory.

Unfortunately, this also holds true on tragedies. The number of families from Greater Lowell impacted by the horror of Sept. 11 was staggering.

Now we are seeing the same thing at the Boston Marathon bombing as we hear about more and more of our friends and neighbors who were hurt in the latest insane assault on innocent Americans.

Our region is like a real family and we find ways to support each other in good times and difficult times.

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